There is No Way

“It is out of this inner ground that you should perform all your works without asking, ‘Why?’ I say truly: So long as you perform your works for the sake of the kingdom of God…you are going completely astray…when people think that they are acquiring more of God in inwardness, in devotion, in sweetness and in various approaches than they do by the fireside or in the stable, you are acting just as if you took God and muffled his head up in a cloak and pushed him under a bench. Whoever is seeking God by ways is finding ways and losing God, who in ways is hidden. But whoever seeks for God without ways will find him as he is in himself.”
—Everything as Divine: The Wisdom of Meister Eckhart, Sermon 5B

I can’t read the medieval German in which Eckhart wrote these sermons, but I would love to know the German word for “ways” that he uses in this passage. The Meister seems to be giving sage advice about the tendency of spiritual seekers to get attached to particular methods (ways) of spiritual practice. We confuse the method for the outcome. As he notes, the Truth is just as easily revealed by the fireside and in the stable (in others words, in our normal, everyday, secular life) as in these pious spiritual practices.

The wonderful paradox of so much teaching from the monks, nuns and hermits of the contemplative tradition is that you don’t need to be a monk, nun or hermit to “get it.” In fact, that’s the essence of mysticism: the Divine is revealed in the ordinary, in everything, everywhere. There is nothing to “get.” It’s already here; it’s what we’re made of.

And how do we act when we see things just as they are? We are able, as Eckhart says, to perform our “works” without asking “Why?” Without an agenda for how things ought to be, we are able to respond to whatever this moment brings with clarity and spontaneity. As Zen Master Seung Sahn used to say, life is not complicated: “Green light, go.”